When Jane Wurwand, founder of Dermalogica, launched her skincare brand in Germany, she was suspected of leading a cult: “We had to sign a document declaring we had never been affiliated with Scientology, because there were all these people smiling, saying the same thing so enthusiastically. They assumed we did a form of brainwashing. I suppose I can see why — we do talk about Dermalogica like a tribe on a mission.”
As a business, Dermalogica does, indeed, have a cultlike quality. The therapists believe its products are the equivalent of toothpaste for a dentist. Wurwand is protective of her brand, ensuring that stock goes to 20,000 licensed salons worldwide and a few authorised sellers. When Boots started buying Dermalogica on the grey market, the company offered a reward to anyone in the business who could find out who was flogging on its stuff to the high-street giant, then took out a full-page ad in the Daily Mail, saying “Dermalogica has 7,000 authorised stockists in the UK and Ireland. Boots isn’t one”.
Wurwand is a British success story. The beauty therapist from Bournemouth arrived in LA in 1983, aged 24, and spotted a gap in the salon skincare market both for education — “Beauty therapists were not well trained” — and for professional skincare products — “The products used in American salons were all French, Italian or German.” Ray, her then boyfriend and now husband, scraped together $15,000 and together they started the company in 1986. Soon, they were providing salons with products to sell to their clients. The company is still privately owned, despite approaches from the cosmetic industry’s big players.
Several decades of field research spent rummaging through my fellow women’s bathroom cabinets is what originally piqued my interest in the company. Dermalogica fans’ shelves are lined with the low-key grey and white packaging that quietly denotes unquestioning devotion to the unshowy brand. It doesn’t advertise, but relies on word of mouth; today, it has a turnover of more than $200m.
Wurwand trained as a beautician, but loathes the word. “I would consider it a huge success if I left the professional skin-therapy industry having eliminated the terms beauty, pampering and indulgence to describe our work,” she says. “If only we were called skin therapists and body therapists, not beauty therapists or beauticians.”
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The head office in LA is a huge glass cube housing lecture theatres, classrooms, a lab, a warehouse, offices, a shop and a canteen. It is exactly how you would imagine a skincare laboratory to look. “It had to feel open and transparent, aspirational and clean, the kind of place skin health would be taught,” Wurwand explains. She is the best kind of female boss, managing her 1,400 employees round the world, 300 of them here, “by wandering around and having an open-door policy”. She does not approve of a culture of long hours. When she had her children, she rearranged her own hours: she works three days a week in the office and always leaves in time to get home to cook a family dinner. Up at 6am, she gets her girls (now 13 and 17) off to school and does an hour of Pilates. “If I don’t do it, I’ll at least run for 30 minutes — if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have the psychic or physical stamina to do things.
“I do meetings in the morning, when I’m full of ideas. I can’t work on a screen, as I’m too adrenalised. You need to know your strengths and weaknesses. Don’t try to improve your weaknesses, just concentrate on your strengths. I don’t like number-crunching, I can’t do it — I’d rather put a stick in my eye.”
I visited Dermalogica’s flagship store on Montana Avenue for a surprisingly cheap facial and consultation — you are encouraged not to buy without a proper skin assessment from a trained therapist — and was told I needed precleanse, cleanser, microfoliant, serum, spray, moisturiser and renewal lip complex. Did I really need all this stuff? One critic of the company describes its regime as “harsh”.
Wurwand is having none of this — skin cleanliness is her mantra and she says that if a customer isn’t getting “great results”, they have not gone through the correct consultation process and are buying the wrong products from the range.
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We stop at Dr Diana Howard’s office. She has been with the company for 18 years and is now vice-president of technical development — a woman who rises at 4.30am to go to the gym. I ask them both if they aren’t engaged in the same old commercial exploitation of women’s vulnerabilities, as so much beauty-industry marketing seems to be. “If I had $1 for every time someone asked us to do a cellulite remover, lip plumper or a bust cream...” Howard says. “We won’t and never will. That is exploiting women. We are just about healthy skin and the beauty that comes with it.”
“I’d rather underclaim and overdeliver,” Wurwand adds. “Keep it pretty factual — no miracle creams, no magic potions, no extraordinary claims backed up by so-called statistics. Good skincare is like brushing your teeth.”
Together, she and Ray have created a family business in which they are heavily involved. As I walk round the clean white and glass cube, she introduces me to director and warehouse worker the same way, easily, proud and by their first name. Her staff tend to stay for years. Once a month, an In-N-Out burger truck arrives in the parking lot “and everyone gets to eat as much as they can consume”.
While Wurwand makes coffee, her husband tells me: “We’ve been fortunate. We arrived at the right time, we got into something we’re both passionate about and stayed focused.”
Focus is a word that describes Wurwand well. She is not fierce or an alpha bully — but, boy, can she focus. “I visualise things clearly, whether it’s the home I want or my new Shanghai flagship store. They are real to me long before they happen.”
Other brands that inspire worship
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Creme de la Mer
With followers shelling out £970 for 500ml, Crème de la Mer is the most coveted brand in the beauty hall. Its creator, Dr Max Huber, famously hit on the sea-kelp formula as he tried to smooth his facial scarring, with “miracle” results. Today, top facialists claim they can spot a user on sight, and addicts insist that no other product touches it.
La Prairie
Who can resist a brand that counts diamonds and caviar as key ingredients? La Prairie has the serum market eating out of its hand, with believers claiming that the exclusive Cellular Complex can rekindle lost lustre and halt crow’s-feet in their tracks. The perfect blend of Swiss science lab and Gallic luxury.
Perricone MD
The dermatologist Nicholas Perricone had us all eating blueberries and salmon for days on end in 2005, with his prescribed “skin plumping” diet. His products and supplements fly out of the store on Madison Avenue,and the Wasp contingent won’t travel without a phial of serum and a pack of his nutriceutical supplements.
Darphin
Guided by the “Pleasure Principle”, Darphin has a niche following of Parisian sybarites. The products don’t simply do the trick, they’re formulated to smell, feel and look as delicious as possible, on the basis that “pleasure is a critical catalyst to enhancing personal beauty”. With its darling mint-green packaging, this is the Ladurée of skincare.